First, Email—Next, the World

iDoneThis started as an easy way to use email to track your progress. We’d email you asking, “What’d you get done today?” All you had to do was reply to the email with your accomplishments, and we’d record them for you.

People loved that because they were spending so much time in their email anyway, so we were saving you time from having to switch back and forth between their email and another website.

Nowadays, you all have been telling us: I use a bunch of different tools to manage my day—Slack, HipChat, Google Calendar, Asana, and more—and email is just one of those tools.

That’s inspired us to make iDoneThis work better with all of the tools you use at work, not just email.

We created our API to lay the groundwork for easy integration with other tools, and we intend to build a few of these integrations ourselves over the coming weeks to see whether it scratches an itch for you.

Onward!

One of the things we’re most proud of here at iDoneThis is that we’ve helped our people get over 15,000,000 things done.

Over the coming months, we want to make it much easier to track what you get done every day, and that means adding product integrations and revamping our site.

We’d love to hear from you on what you like most and what’s bugging you most about iDoneThis. Email me directly here.

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Walter Chen is the co-founder and CEO of iDoneThis, the easiest way to run your daily standup. He's a software engineer and ex-lawyer based in New York, New York. Email him at walter at idonethis dot com to chat.

Robert

Is there any way to “announce” the dones sent using this integration? Or is this just a tool to send the dones using the chatbox.

Walter Chen

Hey Robert! Right now this is focused on making it easy to send in dones using the chatbox. We’re working on the done announcement stream though. Is that something you’d find more useful?

David

Yes, please. I’d definitely like to see iDoneThis post some sort of daily roll up (or even a running stream) of dones back to Slack.

Walter Chen

roger!

Just Curious

Why does `iDoneThis` need read access for messages and files?

http://leif.me Leif Singer

Hi there, thanks for the question! We request from Slack to a) be able to identify you, b) write access, and c) read access. While we need identification and write access for the current iteration of our integration, we don’t need and don’t use the reading permission yet. We’re still iterating on what features we want the integration to provide, and it seems likely that we might want to read from the channels you can see — e.g. to look for trigger words that would kick off an action. That’s why we’re requesting that permission now instead of having everyone re-authorize with Slack when we release an update.

aseemk

Yikes! This is extremely scary. So much private, sensitive communication happens on Slack (both company-wide and individual DMs). It’s beyond startling to know that a third-party gets access to *all* of that if even one person at the company allows access.

http://gasi.ch Daniel Gasienica

To add to this: It’s been a year since your comment, Leif, and correct me if I am wrong, but there’s still nothing in iDoneThis’ Slack integration that would require or warrant a read-all permission. Please at least consider a restricted Slack integration without all those permissions — thanks.

eric

When will you do it also for hipchat?

http://leif.me Leif Singer

It’s on the roadmap, but without a firm date yet. Please shoot an email to help at idonethis dot com to be notified when we have news on this!

Joe

Do you guys have a /goals in progress?

Walter Chen

not in progress, but is that something you’d find useful?

Joe

Most definitely!! Thank you for all the hard work on this awesome tool!

http://leif.me Leif Singer

Thanks! What would /goals do, exactly? List all your goals? Those for today, or those in the future as well? Those from the past not yet completed?

Joe

Mhmm, not sure on the best structure and there is certainly no need to complicate things. I envision using iDoneThis as having a list of goals (daily, monthly, etc) and want to say – done done done on my daily goals, etc.

Oh, by the way: you can already create goals using the /done command by writing “[] ” in front of your done!

David Severski

It would be helpful to have some control over where the confirmation message from iDoneThis goes. Right now the private message goes into whatever channel the slash command is entered, cluttering up a user’s history as they swap channels. I’d like to see the /done command post the response either to a DM or to the #dones channel.

http://leif.me Leif Singer

Thanks for the input David, I understand where you’re coming from. A DM could be equally annoying I think, and the #dones channel could be a bit counter-intuitive. I’m thinking ideally we’d have something like a transient notification, something that goes away after a few seconds. I think we need to put some more thought into this to make sure it works better for everyone. Feel free to email me at leif at idonethis dot com for a deeper discussion if you like.

Markus Hohenwarter

unfortunately, the connection with slack didn’t work for me (markus@geogebra.at);
* the /done command gives me a slackbot message “Whoops!”
* new dones create in iDoneThis don’t get posted to my #done channel in Slack
Any idea what I might do wrong?

ikaruga

Is there a way to get insert my own Dones into a slack channel? The use case is that we are a relatively large company (where everyone’s dones go into the same channel). So for standup, it makes more sense to insert my own into my team channel

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